elearning for music

Web tools for teaching and learning
(to support the new creative industries diplomas)

Your assessment question: how will web tools promote learning in your curriculum area? (Reply to this blog post!)

New Diplomas refocus on core elements of learning:

• team working
• independent enquiry
• self-management
• reflective learning
• effective participation
• creative thinking.

These are traditional educational values!
But we live in a digital world and digital expression (text, design, animation, video, music) is ubiquitous and not restricted to those who can afford expensive technology, not restricted to the immediate locale, not the preserve of institutions and commerce; the individual now has the power to publish, create, share promote and benefit from connecting globally.
If you have something to express, you can now say it to the world and say it imaginatively.
Digital expression and web tools can support all these traditional values.

The New Diplomas also place emphasis on work-related learning.
What will this mean in practice?
Where do the professionals in the creative industries hang out? Online.
It is a disparate industry, populated by many sole traders, freelancers, small businesses – there is not the same tangible industry infrastructure as many other professions, so online communities (often informal) are the 21st Century offices and watering holes. And it’s a global community.

Do you want more work?
Of course not; the web tools you choose, should streamline teaching and learning, stimulating endeavour from the learner, so beware of getting bogged down in presenting information, rather look to provoke activity from learners.

Overview of some tools.

VLE, LMS, MLE are all acronyms associated with online environments that an institution provides for teachers to teach in. (Rather like a space with facilities).
A common tool is Moodle. It’s free, has plenty of great features and many institutions use it, so many teachers and learners will have experienced its look and feel.

A short Moodle tour.

Creative work – videos and comments
Music in Society – forums
Sound and Music Industry – online text assignments
Music Language – resources and year plan

For conformity (and maybe equality of opportunity) an institution with a VLE will reasonably expect all staff to use this tool for their courses, but there are plenty of non-institutional online tools to use. My selection inevitably reflects my personal experiences and preferences, but (just like teaching in the classroom) there are many ways to crack the nut!

I’m going to focus on blogs, wikis and social networks. These all have common features – spaces for anyone to self-publish, communicate and collaborate.

Blogs – a short tour
Ken Lewis’s blog.
About Edublogs for teaching.

Wikis – a short tour.
Elearning for music
Music language wiki
A wiki used collaboratively

Social Networks – a short tour of the CCM Music Ning and an example of a virtual guest lecture.

classroom20.ning.com
ccmmusic.ning.com

As well as the grander benefits of self-publishing these online tools offer, there are also benefits in managing some practicalities. Writing online provides evidence; all published work is stored, date and author stamped. Writing needn’t be in isolation – when you are writing online you do so expecting a response. Media is easily integrated in the presentation process. There is nothing to ‘collect in’ – it exists for all to see (who have permission to see it). It is the start of a portfolio of life long learning.

How will Web 2.0 tools promote learning in your curriculum area?
Why am I asking you to respond to this question (by replying here)?

Assessment is a key element of learning. The new IFL standards require teachers to not only undertake professional development but to reflect on it. By responding here, you have a record of not only your evaluation, but the original notes and resources from the session and the reflections of your colleagues.

Post your reply here! New Diplomas training day and only one thing on their minds!

This is my practice-run at an abstract! The theme is ‘For the learner or by the learner?’ and ‘Individual or Institutional’.

ccmmusic.ning.com is a social network for current and former students and staff of the large music department at City College Manchester, It has been running since September 2007 and sprang out of 2 specific needs identified by students: 1] the lack of connections between courses and campuses, 2] the lact of a homepage and online identity in the college Moodle A 3rd impetus for the network came from my personal experience of teaching and learning in the Moodle environment. where it became clear that activities are more valuable than resources. This is no surprise, as the good practice of the classroom will translate into good practice online. And a 4th impetus came from the JISC funded project SPLICE, run by Mark Johnson at Bolton University, to explore social networking in the creative industries. The social network uses the Ning service and some students have been quick to exploit it, connecting and collaborating in ways that would not have happened otherwise. But other benefits are becoming apparent; learners are gaining confidence in self publishing and networking, they are no longer constrained by the institutions timetable and class structures, they are in one big class, exploring the aspects of music that most interest them, they are getting (and giving) peer feedback, they are able to dictate the space and be content creators. A video tour of the network (recorded in December 2007) is at homepage.mac.com/ccmmusic/ccmmusicning.mov

. Even staff are blogging – reflecting on their professional development and sharing this with the community. In many ways, promoting learning in a social network is counter-institutional, even subversive, but it is putting the learner first, in an environment where learners taking part is more important than teachers delivering. It feels like I’ve created a space, put some cool facilities in there, then chucked the learners in to get on with it! The site has by no means reached critical mass and I am still exploring ways to drive it. The next step is to replicate the benefits of guest lectures in the online environment. Music professionals are being funded to ‘hang out’ in the network for a week and stir things up a bit, by responding to discussions, blogs and student work.

These are notes from my session with Performing Arts, 27th February 2008.

Online learning – getting started

Session outcomes:
• Identify uses for online learning in your teaching.
• Find help for your own Moodle development.

What is Moodle?
Moodle is a virtual learning environment (VLE) or Learning Management System (LMS). It is an online space where you can extend the teaching and learning that goes on in your classroom to a virtual space, and where you and your learners are not restricted to the walls of the college or the timetable. Beautiful.

What can it achieve?
It can be a space to store resources (like handouts and assignment briefs) BUT it is better used as a space for activities, like discussions, reflections, collaboration, writing and formative assessment. It has the added bonus of mixing in digital media (audio and video) with traditional text. When students write online there is no need for submission of work – it is simply there. Contributions to forums can be used as assessment evidence. It is a cool tool and students expect online activities to be part of their daily lives.

How do I get into Moodle?
Go to moodle.ccm.ac.uk and click on your area.

Log in with your college network username and password.
The space is split into FE, HE, Staff and The Arden. To enrol on an existing course (aka – having a nosey round), click the ‘all courses’ link on the right side of the page, choose a course and ‘enrol’. WARNING! The ‘all courses’ link is tiny so you have to look hard for it! If you want to look in NC Music, it is under ‘Arts – Music’. The enrolment key is ‘music’.

How can I set up a Moodle area for my course?
In the college VSR (virtual staff room) click on the elearning link, then the ‘request a course’ link. Or go directly to http://staff.ccm.ac.uk/help/moodle.asp (The VSR is getting a makeover so this link may not work).
Fill in this form and a course will be set up for you.
WARNING! Before you are ‘known’ by the Moodle system you should log in to one or more of the Moodle spaces at moodle.ccm.ac.uk , then do the course request thing.

When the course is created (by a man in a back room somewhere) you will see the course name next time you log in to Moodle. Now you can start pimping your page; click the ‘turn editing on’ button and edit away in your browser.

How do students enrol on my course?
The initial enrolling process is a bit of a faff, but not too painful.
This is a one-time registration process. After this is done, logging in for a student is with their student number for BOTH username and password.
There is a ‘help’ video at http://homepage.mac.com/ccmmusic/moodleenrol.mov

1. Go to moodle.ccm.ac.uk
2. Click on your area.
3. Use your student number for username and password. If this doesn’t work, go to the learning centre and ask for your network password to be reset.
4. This takes you to the Profile page
5. Please make sure you have entered information in all the following boxes
• Email address- City College E Mail only please. This is just your ‘student number’@citycol.com’
• Enter something in the City or Town box
• Enter something in ‘description’ – any comment will do
6. Upload a photo by hitting browse and adding a picture of yourself – though not essential, this gives you more of an identity other than ‘Mr Spongehead’
7. Click ‘update profile’
8. From your profile page, click the CCMFE link (top left)
9. Click on ‘all courses’ which is under ‘course categories’ on the right of the page.
10. Scroll down and find your course and click on the name
11. Students may need an enrolment key, which the tutor sets up. Click ‘enrol me on this course’
12. Congratulations – you are now enrolled on to MOODLE. In future all you need to do is go to moodle.ccm.ac.uk , click on your area and enter your student number as username and password.

Is there more to online learning than Moodle?
Yes indeed! There are numerous free web tools and services that can be used in conjunction with Moodle. You may already be familiar with YouTube and Flickr. CCM is getting its own video sharing site – OurTube, as well as a podcasting service.
Here are a few that light my fire at the moment:
Ning – a DIY social network. Ning has more ’social’ aspects than the learning management system that is Moodle. Users get a homepage where they create an online identiy. It is easy to upload and share digital media (photos, audio, video), it promotes blogs and discussions, and it is generally less formal (but more snazzy) than Moodle. At CCM, the music team is using a Ning to connect students across all courses. www.ning.com. There is a teachers’ Ning at classroom20.ning.com
Wikis – these are online writing and collaboration spaces. www.wikispaces.com
Blogs – another online writing space, not just a web diary! Try edublogs.org and there are many others.
Jing – a video tool to make screen capture movies – useful for lesson recaps. www.jingproject.com

Where do I get help?
Like any new techy process, there is a bit of pain to go through to get started, but nothing that involves heavy-weight nerdiness. There are help documents and discussions in the Staff Moodle, there is a Moodle administrator (Tim Blackburn) and elearning guru (Steve Butler).
Pete Whitfield also has some funding this year (07-08) to support elearning development, so please feel free to make use of that.
pwhitfield@ccm.ac.uk 07958 708661

Any learning session should gather evidence of knowledge, so please respond (by posting a comment to this blog) to this quesion: How could online learning be most effectively used in your curriculum?

It is a time of tremendous change in education and music. I guess it always is, but the here and now feels particularly exciting. I find that what I want to do – the work I feel passionately about – and what I have time to do don’t match up, let alone juggling work with time I can have with my precious family.

So I have decided to resign my current teaching post (2.5 days a week) in the summer to concentrate on aspects of work that I want to focus on as my specialisms; string arranging and elearning. The former continues to grow and the latter I just can’t get enough of, though I’m not sure how I can turn my passion into employment.

I’ve found Moodle to be a fantastic course environment which has certainly extended learning beyond the confines of the classroom and timetable, promoted peer and self evaluations, assisted with evidence building through electronic portfolios, as well as making best use of interactive formative and summative assessment and digital media (particularly video recordings of every practical session). My reflections are here.
But social tools (with features beyond the current infrastructure of Moodle) mean the learning process as offered by an institution can and must change, through self publishing, communities of interest, discussions and collaborations. I’m currently involved with the SPLICE project making extensive use of the Ning platform. The cultural change required to truly embrace digital tools is enormous and I don’t underestimate the  task, but that is something I want to do, and, indeed, I can’t stop myself doing it!

So, my plan is, to retain (hopefully) some part time teaching and develop involvement with institutions where I can specialise in elearning for music and bring about change for both teachers and learners.  I need to explore funding as the sort of role I believe would bring value to a department (I’ll call it etutor for now) is not yet typically part of the strategy.

I have, through practice and my personal CPD activities been a voracious learner in the past few years, following an exponential curve in my experiences of elearning in my subject area.  Even though my professional musical work seems to be taking over, I most certainly don’t want to lose my involvement with music education.

Joe Pisano at musictech.net is an incredibly proactive blogger! I’m most grateful for his dedicated work and humbled that he’s including me is his project to build a community of music education bloggers. He is a real community guy, not only publishing his own reflections but contributing to the conversations around the music education blog network – except that’s the current ‘hole’ – there is a surprisingly flimsy network of music education bloggers. In other areas of education you find substantial networks (see Classroom 2.0) but us musos are late (as usual).

He’s set up some parameters to get a music education blogger ‘in the club’ (like 2 posts per month and contribute to conversations elsewhere) but I don’t think he’ll be sending the boys round if you miss your targets. This got me reflecting on my own online activity of late; I crashed and burned a few months back when my laptop died. I had no backup of rss and podcast feeds and I’ve been playing catchup ever since. But also my ‘portfolio’ of online activity is now much more disparate than just a single blog.  My string arranging blog, a few wikis, a few more nings (including 2 I manage for student activity) and my institution’s Moodle areas.  (Not to mention Facebook and Myspace)  And then I’m dabbling with Twitter.  So, in my defence your honour, that’s why posts in this blog have been thin on the ground!  But I love being part of the global conversations, ‘cos talking is good!

Here are Joe’s parameters:

1. You must have (or have started) a blog site and not a simple website. 
2. You must agree to post 2 or more posts per month about a topic that is interesting to you, your students, the music audience as a whole, etc. that related to music education and/or music technology in the classroom environment. Literally, you can almost blog about anything related… the “world is your oyster!”
3. You must agree to not “covet” your materials and share them with the world under a creative commons license (your pick!).
4. You must actively participate in our “global conversation” about our field by joining in the conversation with others:
   1. Agreeing to comment on two others ME Bloggers posts per month
   2. Share your blog with others by linking to the other ME Bloggers in either your blogroll or a page of ME Bloggers
   3. Agreeing to answer legitimate quesions by ME Bloggers and others that post questions on your site in a timely manner.
5. Let me know you exist!  Comment after this post, or visit our contact page!
6. When you become an ME blogger, post about our campaign as much as you want, tell your friends…we know this is going to be a long haul…let’s take the first step together!

I reckon I’m doing OK with most of those (as long I can include blog posts beyond this blog) – just need to blog roll and rss my disparate online activity in one place, and subscribe to the other group bloggers and get talking!